Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography and Chair of the Executive Committee of the National Center for Geographic Information & Analysis
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After 19 years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as Chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988. Since then, he has served as Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and Director of the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science. He received his BA degree from Cambridge University in Physics and his PhD in Geography from McMaster University.

Goodchild's research publications, including more than 400 scientific papers and a dozen authored and edited books, have laid a foundation for geographic information science and spatial analysis, extended the development of geo-libraries, contributed to understanding uncertainty in geographic data, and advanced capabilities in location-allocation modeling. He was Editor of
Geographical Analysis for three years and of the "Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Sciences" section of the
Annals of the Association of American Geographers for six years. Goodchild is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has received honorary doctorates from Laval University, Keele University, Ryerson University, and McMaster University. He is a recipient of the Canadian Association of Geographers' Award for Scholarly Distinction, the Association of American Geographers' award for Outstanding Scholarship, the Canadian Cartographic Association's Award of Distinction for Exceptional Contributions to Cartography, the Educator of the Year Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Intergraph Award, and the Horwood Critique Prize (twice) of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA). In 2007, Goodchild was inducted into the GIS Hall of Fame of URISA and received the prestigious international Prix Vautrin Lud, in St Dié-des-Vosges, France.

DR. KEITH C. CLARKE is a research cartographer and professor. He holds the B.A.
degree with honours from Middlesex Polytechnic, London, England, and the M.A. and Ph. D.
from the University of Michigan, specializing in Analytical Cartography. He joined the
faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996.